"I
WANT YOU TO FEEL THE WAY I DO" INTENSITATCurator: Rosa Martínez.Sala Montcada. La Caixa Foundation. Barcelona, Spain. April
27th to may 23rd, 1993.

Dressed for intensity
I want you to feel the way I do: There's barbed wire wrapped all
around my head and my skin grates on my flesh from the inside. How
can you be so comfortable only 5" to the left of me? I don't
want to hear myself think, feel myself move. It's not that I want
to be numb, I want to slip under your skin: I will listen for the
sound you hear, feed on your
thought, wear your clothes.
Now I have your attitude and you 're not comfortable anymore. Making
them yours you relieved me of my opinions, habits, impulses. I should
be grateful but instead... you 're beginning to irritate me: I am
not going to live with myself inside your body, and I would rather
practice being new on someone else.

When I saw The dress (/ want you to feel the way
I do) for the first time, I was pierced through by an arrow, both
viscerally and intellectually. It has —as does much of Sterbak's
work— an intense perception of the present, a powerful representation
of the way we live and feel the passions that agitate, consume,
constitute and torment our "matter". The gradual incandescence
which infuses it appears to be a metaphor for the intensities of
love, for the dialectic of desire-rejection, for its kindling and
extinction. The metal structure of which it is formed alludes to
the invisible prisons in which our emotions encarcelate us. The
open arms seem to stretch out towards the other, although we can
also percieve in them the ambiguity and the fatal destructiveness
of the embrace.
The text accompanying the electric dress speaks of the transferences
and transitions of identity. To love is to go out of oneself towards
the other, but in that journey of desire a "monstrous contradiction"
(Hegel) lies concealed, since in love I sacrifice the other in order
to be myself, at the same time as the other sacrifices me, converts
me into an object, possesses me and attempts to impose his law on
me.

Jana Sterbak knows that the Other has several
faces: the Other as mirror, the one in whom I am reflected, whom
I love and hate, in whom I am doubled and with whom I exchange myself,
in whom I long to lose myself in order to find myself, the one who
travels through me and with whom I may pass down the tortuous pathways
of passion,
whose pleasures are also the prelude to dissatisfaction, pain and
death. And the Other who judges, who sanctions my mirror games,
that one whom Lacan calls the Great Other, in that he is the guardian
of the law and of the symbolic.

Our bodies are always, fatally, the field on which
desire and law fight out their battle, the place where we oscillate
between the inclination to let ourselves be carried away by the
impulses and passions which impel us towards the other, and the
tendency to be subjects, to subject and adapt ourselves to the norms
which configure the self.

In the work of Jana Sterbak we hear the echoes
of these battles, but the opposing forces are not the body and the
soul; the antithesis between psychic subjectivity and physiological
objectivity has ceased to apply and a new psychosomatic synthesis
has taken its place, slipping into dress as metaphor for "the
inferiority that flows towards the exterior" (Gurmendez). In
Jana Sterbak, the dress becomes a denuding which renders visible
the occult forces of the self, all that is spiritual, emotive and
passionate.

Klossowski, in The Laws of Hospitality, speaks
of the transitiveness of the body, of how the essence of eroticism
consists in being hospitable, in being capable of putting on or
inhabiting other bodies as if they were one's own. Jana Sterbak
accentuates in her work this dimension of the dress as body; the
transit between the body and what covers it is a transubstantiation.
Accordingly, a work such as Hairshirt becomes an anxiety-laden signifier
of the finality of desire and Jacket condenses its antithesis: the
impossibility of escaping from the self.

Jana Sterbak's dresses are "bodies without
organs" (Deleuze-Guattari), they are "fields of the immanence
of desire", they are alive, but only intensities circulate
through them; only the convulsions of love, of the fear of death,
of frustration; only the flaring up of beauty, of inspiration, of
pain and desperation....

Vanitas. Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic alludes
to the intensity of the temporalities of the human being, whose
first and last horizon is death. The making explicit of this ephemeral
character, relative as it is to exhaustion and wearing out, is combined
with a mordant critique of the forms that the body is obliged to
adopt in a culture whose anxiety is to convert it into the paradigm
of eternal youth.

Vanitas destroys the taboo which prohibits us
from seeing ourselves and from being seen as we really are: animal
flesh. And in revealing the inertia of this flesh, which will rot
and decompose, it summons up the repugnant and sinister nature of
the terrible death sentence hanging over us. This mise en scene
is no doubt liberating, but it is also obscene —to the extent
that it transgresses the prohibition against making visible certain
contents—, irrational and indecent — in that it denies
the process of civilization, and carries us back to our constitutive
animality-.

Sterbak establishes disquieting connections between
the representable and the unrepresentable, at the same time as she
questions the evidence of certain notions relative to the body,
in her desire to posit anew the form in which we inhabit our identities,
and with the intention of expanding the possibilities for experience
which enable the subject to construct itself through others, knowing
that the encounter is more important than the identity of the person
encountered.

In her aesthetic investigations, Jana Sterbak
eludes the idea of style, projecting herself in the heterogeneity
of multiple materials and shifting through a diversity of creative
processes and formulas, always according pre-eminence to the idea
over the form and seeking to discover and stimulate the secret correspondences
that exist between the materials and their spiritual connotations.
In this way she creates new languages which are inscribed in the
first beginnings of a new history of subjectivity, in which woman
proclaims the revolutionary power of her visions and her energies,
contributing to the renewal of the sense of her condition —as
a person and as an artist— and can situate herself in the
wider context of reflection on the human condition.

In the piece Corona Laurea (Noli me tangere),
inspiration and madness are associated as extreme forms of mental
energy, in an ironic reflection on the disturbing
ambivalence of the powers of the creative artist. It is, however,
in the performance Artist as combustible that we find the most fascinating
interpretation of the rapture that shakes and inflames the artist.
In this performance, Jana Sterbak stands naked in a darkened room
with a small heap of gunpowder on top of her head, sending out of
herself an intense tongue of flame which lasts for only a few seconds
and alludes to the transitory nature of the inspiration that illumines
poetic visions.

To the extent that it makes possible the emergence
of the darkest fluids that give life and sense to human matter,
her vigorous, disquieting and subversive art has something "demonic"
in it, something damned, which takes pleasure in destroying in order
to create; something diabolical that causes the most recondite intensities
to come to the surface and touches the very frontiers of madness;
something incommunicable and unrepresentable, for all that it communicates
and is represented; something that occupies a place beyond Good
and Evil.